This article examines how the social and moral question of
contemporary Austria's relationship with its Nazi past is
being treated in the Viennese theater. The dialectic of
drama and society exemplified in this article links it with
those in Currents in Modern Thought (p.462), collected
under the title "Theater: From the Mask to the Moderns."
These discuss the relation of dramatic art to its culture,
from the Greeks to Samuel Beckett, and from the East as
well as the West.
Vienna often reminds me of the aging Broadway star Carlotta in Stephen Sondheim's Follies, who sings, "Good times and bum times, I've seen them all, and, my dear, I'm still here."
Like Carlotta, Vienna has acquired over the years a magnificent wardrobe and a doubtful reputation. Once, not so long ago, she kicked and danced across Europe's political stage as the glittering imperial city of the Hapsburgs, rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, in semiretirement, she is only the capital of the small, neutral republic of Austria, squeezed between East and West, in the heart of Europe.
But she still has several places to her name, and shops that look like palaces, and squares that were invented for Hollywood before Hollywood itself was invented. Still stylish, though not always dressed nowadays in the latest fashion, she frets about her past affairs and invents excuses as to why they all went wrong. And like Carlotta, she is madly, passionately in love with the stage.
City Of Theaters
There are more than forty theaters in Vienna, almost as many as in London, which is ten times her size. The pride of them all (apart from the Opera House) is the Burgtheater, designed and built by the German architect Gottfried Semper in 1888. This massive Second Empire building overlooks the great square of Heldenplatz, which is dominated by the Imperial Palace and the Austrian Parliament.
The Burgtheater celebrated its hundredth birthday in 1988, just before Christmas, in a manner that Carlotta would have appreciated--with three months of scandal, two nights of triumph, and a prolonged examination of the soul.
Other European cities would welcome such an event with pious tributes. Vienna, however, laid down upon the psychiatrist's couch that one of its former citizens, Sigmund Freud, invented. Layer after layer of history was peeled off, traumas exposed, and ancestors were blamed unto the third and fourth generation.
This is what happened. The Burgtheater's artistic director, Claus Peymann, decided to mark the occasion by commissioning a new play from Austria's leading dramatist, Thomas Bernhard. Rehearsals stared in the summer under conditions of well-publicized secrecy. Nothing was then known about the play, apart from its title, Heldenplatz, but that was significant
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